Tiggly is a toy for kids who might be past the “teethe on your iPad” and just below the “I want to play the birds game” stages of mental development. Designed by a parent, Steve Miller of Cambridge, MA, the system includes three little shapes and a set of apps that allow kids to interact with shapes, colors, and animals on the screen.
In my experience, kids are using iPhones and iPads younger and younger. Our eight month old stares intently at pictures of baby faces on the iPhone and my son and daughter knew how to slide to unlock before they could crawl. This gives them something fun to do on the iPad and, using capacitive touch points, allows them to put shapes right on the on-screen representations in order to win games and interact with characters.
The toy and three apps cost $ 29. The apps are quite simple and include:
Tiggly Safari is a fun, immersive app where toddlers are guided to place shapes on the screen to form animals that come to life Target age: 2 to 3 yearsTiggly Draw allows toddlers to use the Tiggly Shapes as stamps and as paint brushes. Target age: 18 months and upTiggly Match is a game that teaches kids how to identify shapes. Target age: 18 months to 2 years
Clearly we’re not working on advanced particle physics here, but it definitely looks like something I could get into with the kids. Miller built the toy for his children after realizing that the educational games for the very small on the iPad required a level of interaction that was quite difficult for the wee ones. Miller needs a minimum run of 5,000 pieces to make these fairly cheaply so he’s looking for a Kickstarter pledge of $ 50,000 to start shipping these things. He’s at about $ 10,000 so maybe we’ll have some happy shapes to help smear pureed pears all over our iPads this holiday.
Luxury Swiss watch maker Urwerk is among the few top watch brands that can excite both gadget lover and traditional watch enthusiast alike. Their secret is consistently pushing forward in terms of modern design as well as technical innovation. Their new UR-210 timepiece might look like a spaceship, but is really just a gadget to tell you that it is time to get off your butt and exercise. It is nevertheless beautiful, and precision-made.
Automatic mechanical watches are wound by the rotation of a weighted rotor which is meant to move with the motion of your wrist. This motion is used to wind a mainspring. Watches with power reserve indicators like the UR-210 tell you how much power is left in the movement. Urwerk added a novel feature connected to the power reserve indicator called a winding efficiency indicator. Purely mechanical, this tool measures the amount of power you’ve generated for the watch over the last two hours. If you aren’t moving around enough (and thus not generating power), the winding efficiencyindicator goes into the red zone. If you are shaking fists all daylong you’ll be in the green zone.
Urwerk considers this new function to be a novel way for the owner to connect with their watch. Like most Urwerk timepieces, the time is told via a special satellite arm system which looks incredibly cool. It is a fantastically elaborate new timepiece with a complication you might grow to love or hate.
You can read a bit more on the watch here.
Nokia's Windows Phone 8 handsets could be most expensive Currently Nokia is the manufacturer of choice when it comes to Windows Phone, thanks to its partnership with Microsoft, however that could be about to change as the software giant has selected the HTC Windows Phone 8X as its flagship device for the … Read more on TechRadar UK
Windows Phone 8X Pre-orders Start October 21 at Best Buy Best Buy will begin selling pre-orders for the Windows Phone 8X by HTC this weekend according to a WPCentral report. According to the report an image from Best Buy's flier for the week of October 21-27 reveals the pre-order date. The image shows a … Read more on Gotta Be Mobile
HTC Windows Phone 8X Release Date, T-Mobile: How Limited Storage Could … Samsung's Windows 8 phone, the ATIV S, comes with 16GB of storage, but it will come with a micro SD slot so users can add more memory at a later date. In a comparison test between the ATIV S, Lumia 920 and HTC Phone 8X, the ATIV topped HTC … Read more on Books & Review
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Short version: Western Digital finally has released a new Thunderbolt external hard drive to justify the existence of the Thunderbolt port on your laptop. The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is a desktop external hard drive, which uses two 3.5-inch 1 TB VelociRaptor hard drives. These disks spin at 10,000 RPM and are a good compromise between speed and storage inside a desktop computer. Yet, using them in an external enclosure comes with a major drawback: a hefty price of $ 899.
Features:
- Two 1 TB 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor drives
- Two Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining
- A Thunderbolt cable in the box — a $ 50 value
- Drives can be replaced
- RAID 0 or RAID 1 options to have a 2 TB drive (RAID 0) or two 1 TB drives always in sync (RAID 1)
- Western Digital Product Page
Pros:
- It’s fast
- Daisy-chaining with Thunderbolt
- You can replace a faulty drive
Cons:
- MSRP: $ 899
- Noisier than a MacBook Pro 13″
- No USB3
Long version:
Before diving into some read/write tests, let’s talk about the external features of the VelociRaptor Duo. It is a heavy and bulky desktop hard drive that will sit on your desk in a corner and never move again.
At the same time, due to its speed and limited capacity compared to some desktop external hard drives — you can easily get a slower but comparably sized 6 TB drive for the same price — you will have to find a special use for it aside from storing backups of your computer. An entry-level NAS is another alternative that could be considered at that price.
For example, it would be a good addition to a current-generation MacBook Air limited by its 128 GB or 256 GB SSD. But SSD prices will certainly drop in the coming years.
The exterior of the VelociRaptor Duo is made entirely of plastic. It looks fine when sitting on your desk, but feels cheap when you are moving the drive around. A discreet LED indicates that the device is plugged correctly. The drive is also noisier than the MacBook Pro used to write this review, even when not reading or copying files.
It gets warm, but that’s not very important for a desktop external drive. You can change the hard drives quite easily without using a screwdriver. Even though VelociRaptor drives are standard 3.5-inch SATA drives, there is a sticker that says “Only use VelociRaptor drives.” It remains to be seen if it is a serious claim as for the European patent-protected Nespresso coffee machine or only marketing advice. Finally, a Thunderbolt cable is in the box, a $ 50 value.
Daisy-chaining multiple Thunderbolt devices is a convenient feature when using a laptop. For example, the VelociRaptor Duo is currently plugged to a MacBook Pro and a display is plugged to the VelociRaptor using a DVI to Mini DisplayPort adapter. Only one port is necessary on the laptop to use those two devices.
When it comes to performances, the VelociRaptor duo is a nice surprise. In Raid 0, we could measure 352.3 MB/s and 374.1 MB/s respectively for writing and reading large files. Yet, dealing with a lot of small files was much slower with 13.2 MB/s for random writing. That is the disadvantage of mechanical hard drives, but the VelociRaptor Duo appeared faster than the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt. Clearly, the bottleneck is not the connectivity but the drive.
In real-world use, copying a folder from the MacBook Pro to the VelociRaptor Duo would not be relevant because of the 5,400 RPM hard drive found in that Mac. That is why we copied a 69 GB folder containing small and big files already on the VelociRaptor Duo. It took 13’02″, at an approximate speed of 89 MB/s. The same test would have been many times slower using a USB2 drive.
The VelociRaptor Duo is a particular drive filling a particular need for those that feel cramped using a small SSD as their main drive. It is expensive but makes good use of the Thunderbolt interface. Yet, it is very hard to recommend the drive because of the price. As SSD capacities will increase a lot in future laptops, a cheaper desktop external drive with Thunderbolt might be good enough. The rest of the money could be saved to buy your next laptop with a bigger SSD.
This is a series of licensed Star Wars apparel by Tokyo/Paris based Comme des Garçon. Please, just look at this shirt for a moment and take it all in. Who would wear that? SPOILER: Not even your dad. And it’s $ 350. That’s $ 350 to look like a f***ing idiot. Granted a lot of the time that’s the name of the game in high fashion, but COME ON. I’d rather wear my bare skin on fire.
Hit the jump for a couple more button-ups and some printed tees with Star Wars slogans that go for the rock-bottom price of $ 100 (long-sleeves for $ 120).
Two years after it was meant to go live, and with a list of backers that include the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk, YouView today finally crashed the UK TV party. Available by the end of July with a selection of major retailers, the service is based around an all-in-one set-top box that you can use without a subscription, which includes 100 digital TV and radio channels, catch-up and on-demand services, as well as the ability to record programs.
But with a pricetag that will begin at £299 ($ 469) without the required broadband thrown in, and competing against a host of existing services, is this a case of too-little, too-late?
At the launch event earlier today, Lord Alan Sugar — a self-made entrepreneur in the UK who is the star of the UK edition of The Apprentice — called the event “a great moment in British television,” but some of the reactions online have been quite to the contrary:
The service will first launch as a standalone product selling at major retailers like John Lewis, Dixons, Comet, Currys and Richer Sounds — as well as Amazon and the supermarket giant Tesco. The price for the set-top box is likely to go down when BT and TalkTalk, two of the investors in the service, start to bundle it with their own broadband offerings — where it will be part of a subscription package, much like carriers do with mobile devices.
The service sounds good enough, but for a set-top box pay TV service, it’s hard to see why consumers would choose this over something like Sky’s, Virgin’s or BT’s existing TV offerings, which already come bundled with broadband and offer all of these features and more.
YouView first came to life years ago as Project Canvas, a hopeful-looking joint venture between broadcasters, infrastructure players and broadband service providers to offer digital TV and on-demand services that would have, at the time, been a disruptive and probably welcome presence against the dominant pay-TV players Sky and Virgin. However, regulatory and technical hitches, coupled with other delays and management changes, have been an almost constant presence on the project from the start. In all, it has been estimated that the project will cost £115 million ($ 180 million) over four years from April 2010. (Some might argue that this, in fact, was the problem: not nearly enough money put into this to create something truly groundbreaking.)
Fast forwarding to 2012 and the final launch of the product, the whole industry has moved on: not only are there more pay-TV providers out there (including BT itself with its Vision service) but the existing services have become a lot more encompassing — for example BBC’s catch-up service iPlayer can be accessed via Virgin and BT’s services. On top of that, there are a host of other ways to get your TV fix now via OTT plays from Netflix, Amazon/LoveFilm, Google and more.
Moreover, YouView’s basic offering — 100 digital TV and radio channels, seven day catch-up and on demand programmes from the content libraries of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 — lacks something else that has been the clincher for many a household prepared to invest in pay-TV in the UK: exclusive content rights, specifically around sport. (Although the lesson of ITV Digital was that even this does not guarantee success.)
And yet, and yet… even if the initial signs do not look good, there is still some potential for how this might develop. YouView says it has had “interest” from over 300 potential content partners — with the “formal enrolment process” for them to join the platform also launched today. (Why YouView didn’t get these potential partners on board before launch, however, is not clear.)
Richard Halton, CEO, points out that in a trial of the service covering 2,000 homes, the feedback has been “very encouraging.” “It confirms that YouView is easy to set up and use and different to what has gone before,” he said. “In many ways we’ve only just begun.” Time will tell if YouView’s beginning was actually it’s end, too.
Question by : Is there anything equivalent to an iPad but less expensive? Hi. So I know this about computers: Macs are more expensive, but Dell is cheaper, and although it doesn’t have all the quality of a Mac, you could say it is just as good. Is there anything just like an iPad, with very similar (meaning high) quality? Thanks for the help! Samsung Galaxy Tab seems just as expensive.
Best answer:
Answer by R3beLsamsung galaxy tab
Give your answer to this question below!
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Because what good is Satan if you can’t chain him under a grill in the back of a truck and use his heat to cook some burgers, the 666 Burger foodtruck in New York is offering a $ 666 ‘Douche Burger’, beating the previous record holder for world’s most expensive burger by over $ 350 (previous record was $ 295). That…I’d have to sell my soul to afford that. BOOM — satanic tie-in.
Thrillist describes the Douche Burger as “a $ 666 edible fiscal disaster that piles caviar, lobster & truffles on top of a foie-stuffed, gold-leaf-wrapped Kobe patty, smothers it with Gruyere melted with Champagne steam, and finishes it off with BBQ sauce made using Kopi Luwak coffee that’s passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet.”
First of all, there’s no such thing as Kobe beef in the United States . Secondly, that doesn’t even sound good. You know what it sounds like? “A stomach ache and then uncontrollable, explosive diarrhea nowhere near a bathroom?” *fist-bump* We’ve all been there.
Hit the jump for a couple more shots, none of which are of the actual burger although they insist it’s real and a social commentary on douchey chefs…or something.
Question by : Why the OLED TVs are so expensive? According to all the article and news from CES-2012 OLED TVs are very expensive as well as having short life span. Will it be an everyday TV or not.
Best answer:
Answer by FranciscoOLED TVs have a better contrast ratio, off axis viewing, and color reproduction; All these things make OLED TV superior to any other TV. Also the life span of the TV. 50,000+ hours plus is expected that 17years at 8 hours a day. So I think this article that you read is very old.
Add your own answer in the comments!
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It seems that Verizon (or Motorola) got the message: The Droid Xyboards are too damn expensive when tied to a 2-year commitment. Until today, Verizon was selling the 10.1 Xoom 2 for $ 529 and required a 2-year contract. Ludicrous. Well, after today’s price cuts, the prices are less absurd, but just slightly.
Verizon lopped $ 50 off the on-contract price making the 16GB 10.1-inch $ 479 with the 8-inch retailing just $ 379. Of course buyers are still required to sign on the dotted line in order to get that price. But the unsubsidized models didn’t get the same love. Never mind that the new tabs are essentially downgraded versions of the 10 month old Xoom, these models still retail for $ 699 for buyers smart enough to avoid the contract (but dumb enough to want the tab in the first place).
Even with the lower price, the 2-year commitment is very troublesome. By essentially locking an early adopter (every single Android tab buyer still qualifies for this title) into already dated hardware, carriers are dramatically slowing the adoption rate. If Apple or AT&T had employed the same tactic with the original iPad, the iPad 2 would surely not been as big of a hit. But now, whatever delusional Android fanboy buys a Xoom 2 from Verizon on-contract, barring paying the high ETF, they’re locked into that particular model until at least 2013.
It looks like once again everyone’s to blame for another Motorola tablet failure.
